A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [258]
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see a very tall, thin coloured man. He had occasionally seen this man about St Vincent Street and knew him to be a solicitor’s clerk. In the past year or two they had been nodding to one another but they had never spoken.
‘Is true?’ the man asked.
Mr Biswas noted the man’s size, the concern in his voice and in his young-old face. ‘Yes, man.’
‘You really got notice?’
Mr Biswas responded to this sympathy by pursing his lips, looking down at his glass and nodding.
‘Hell of a thing. How long?’
‘Notice. A month, I suppose.’
‘Hell of a thing. Married? Children?’
‘Four.’
‘God! You try the government? You in the Service now, not so? And ain’t they have some sort of housing loans scheme?’
‘Only for established people.’
‘You can’t get a good place to rent for all the tea in China,’ the man said. He edged his way around Mr Biswas, cutting him off from the talkers, some of whom were beginning to eat, at the bar, at tables. ‘Much easier to buy a house really. In the long run. What you drinking? Lager? Two lagers, miss. A hell of a thing, man.’
The lagers came.
‘I know,’ the man said. ‘I was in the same position not so long ago. I only had my mother. But even that was hell, I could tell you. Is like being sick.’
‘Sick?’
‘When you sick you forget what it is to be well. And when you well you don’t really know what it is to be sick. Is the same with not having a place to go back to every afternoon.’
Lights were turned on in the café. People stood silently in every doorway, looking out at the rain. From the dark street came the hiss of wet tyres and the beat of the rain, drowning the scrape of knives and forks on plates, the chatter.
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘But look. What you doing now?’
‘I got to go to the country. But with all this rain –’
‘You know what? You better come and have some lunch with me. No, not here.’ He looked around the café, and in his look Mr Biswas saw the chatterers rebuked for their callousness.
They went outside and hurried through the rain, brushing against people who stood close to walls. They turned into a side street and entered the grimy green hall of a Chinese restaurant. The coconut-fibre mat was damp and black, the floor wet. They went up bare steps and the solicitor’s clerk seemed to be continually meeting people he knew. To all of them he said, patting Mr Biswas on the shoulder, ‘Hell of a thing here, man. The man got notice. And he got nowhere to go.’ People looked at Mr Biswas, made sympathetic sounds, and Mr Biswas, muddled by the lager, the strange faces and the unexpected interest, became very tragic.
They went to a celotex-partitioned cubicle and the solicitor’s clerk ordered food.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But look. My position is this. I living with my mother in a two-storey house in St James. But she a lil old now, you know –’
‘My mother dead,’ Mr Biswas said, finding himself, to his surprise, eating. ‘Blasted doctor didn’t want to give a death certificate. Write him a letter, though. A long one –’
‘Hell of a thing, man. But the position is this. The old queen have a lil heart trouble. Can’t climb steps and that sort of thing. It does strain the heart, you know.’ The solicitor’s clerk put his hand on his chest and his shoulders see-sawed. ‘And right at this moment I have a offer of a house in Mucurapo which would suit the old lady right down to the ground. Trouble is, I can’t buy it unless somebody buy mine.’
‘And you want me buy yours.’
‘In a sort of way. I could help you and you could help me. And the old queen.’
‘Upstairs house, you say.’
‘All modern conveniences and full and immediate vacant possession.’
‘I wish I had that sort of money, old man.’
‘Wait until you see it.’
And before the meal was over Mr Biswas had agreed to go to see the house. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he had no more than eight hundred dollars and was only wasting the clerk’s time and his own. But courtesy demanded no less.
‘You would